Let’s talk about fat…(Part 1)

…and I don’t mean in your food. I have no space in my cupboards or body for foods that claim to be fat free or low fat or reduced fat. Why you ask…because they obviously don’t work people! Have a look around, does it look like since we’ve replaced butter with margarine that we’ve been able to control our weight? No we haven’t and that’s because fat doesn’t make you fat, eating low nutrient, processed food does.

My own diet and every diet I recommend to people contains a healthy dose of good quality fat and tons and tons of plant foods, namely vegetables. I don’t sweat the fat content in my food because I make sure to use only the most nutritious fats out there. That’s my kitchen therapy philosophy.

But fat is a very important thing and the kind of fat I want to talk about is the fat in your body. Nature’s insulation. The belly blubber. The jiggle in your wiggle. The junk in your trunk. Adipose tissue (that’s the medical term for it). And I don’t want to talk about body fat because I want to talk about being skinny and how great that is for everyone because that’s not the case. Your body type and metabolism know what the perfect weight is. I want to talk about why it’s so important to reach that perfect, healthy weight and stay there. I’m telling you, fat stresses out more than your beach vacation with Brad Pitt and here’s why:

Fat is active: oh yeah baby, while you’re sitting on the couch eating a pint of ice cream, your fat isn’t just sitting back and relaxing…oh no, it’s releasing hormones and it’s shooting out chemicals that cause inflammation. We have learned recently that fat tissue in the body releases powerful hormones called adipokines. Some of them have good effects on the body and some of them have bad. What happens if you have too much fat on board is that the fat tissue becomes confused and unregulated and starts producing too much of the bad hormones and not enough of the good hormones.

Fat moves: contrary to popular belief, fat likes to exercise and sometimes it decides to take a hike and move out from under the skin and into much more precious organs like your liver and muscles. Your liver and muscles don’t want globules of fat getting in the way of their business and this can lead to impairments in how they work which causes disease.

Fat makes you sick: and not “I’ve got the sniffles sick”, I mean chronically sick. Too much fat has been directly linked to developing diabetes and heart disease. When there’s too much body fat, there’s too much cholesterol. Having too much cholesterol means that there’s so much floating around that your body has to store it somewhere. That somewhere may be your arteries where it causes inflammation and leads to blockages that cause heart attacks. Those same hormones I talked about above also have effects on insulin and may cause disruption in insulin release and production leading to diabetes. In fact, 60-80% of people with type II diabetes are obese!

You can see that fat is no jiggly, wiggly, joking around matter! Considering how prevalent obesity and all the diseases related to obesity are in Canada, I have been learning tons about fat tissue in school. I’ve tried to simplify that information as much as I can but if you are interested in getting more in depth, consider reading this article. If you want to take my word for it then stay tuned because, next week, we’ll talk about fat some more, specifically how to get rid of it and what kinds of healthy fats to include in your diet.